faithful friend in repelling imputations whose least
evil is to make me ridiculous," said Balthazar. "Ha! so they think me
ruined? Well, my dear Pierquin, two months hence I shall give a fete in
honor of my wedding-day whose magnificence will get me back the respect
my dear townsmen bestow on wealth."

Madame Claes colored deeply. For two years the anniversary had been
forgotten. Like madmen whose faculties shine at times with unwonted
brilliancy, Balthazar was never more gracious and delightful in
his tenderness than at this moment. He was full of attention to his
children, and his conversation had the charms of grace, and wit,
and pertinence. This return of fatherly feeling, so long absent, was
certainly the truest fete he could give his wife, for whom his looks
and words expressed once more that unbroken sympathy of heart for heart
which reveals to each a delicious oneness of sentiment.

Old Lemulquinier seemed to renew his youth; he came and went about
the table with unusual liveliness, caused by the accomplishment of
his secret hopes. The sudden change in his master's ways was even more
significant to him than to Madame Claes. Where the family saw happiness
he saw fortune. While helping Balthazar in his experiments he had come
to share his beliefs. Whether he really understood the drift of his
master's researches from certain exclamations which escaped the chemist
when expected results disappointed him, or whether the innate tendency
of mankind towards imitation made him adopt the ideas of the man in
whose atmosphere he lived, certain it is that Lemulquinier had conceived
for his master a superstitious feeling that was a mixture of terror,
admiration, and selfishness. The laboratory was to him what a
lottery-office is to the masses,--organized hope. Every night he went
to bed saying to himself, "To-morrow we may float in gold"; and every
morning he woke with a faith as firm as that of the night before.

His name proved that his origin was wholly Flemish. In former days the
lower classes were known by some name or nickname derived from their
trades, their surroundings, their physical conformation, or their moral
qualities. This name became the patronymic of the burgher family which
each established as soon as he obtained his freedom. Sellers of linen
thread were called in Flanders, "mulquiniers"; and that no doubt was
the trade of the particular ancestor of the old valet who passed from
a state of serfdom to one